After spending 176 days in space, aboard the International Space Station, one NASA astronaut, Barry Wilmore, and two Russian Federal Space Agency cosmonauts, Alexander Samokutyaev and Elena Serova, returned to solid Earth on Wednesday evening at approximately 10:07 pm ET. Below is an image of the return capsule they were in as the re-entered Earth's atmosphere:

In February of 1960, the American magazine Look ran a cover story that asked, “Should a Girl Be First in Space?” It was a sensational headline representing an audacious idea at the time. And as we all know, the proposal fell short. In 1961, NASA sent Alan Shepard above the stratosphere, followed by dozens of other spacemen over the next two decades. Only in 1983 did Sally Ride become America’s first female astronaut to launch.

NASA astronauts on a spacewalk Thursday accidentally lost a fabric shield needed for the International Space Station – a minor setback in what was otherwise a record-setting mission for one of the crew members.

Three Chinese astronauts on Monday entered an orbiting module for the first time, in a move broadcast live on China's state television network and a key step towards the nation's first space station.The astronauts, two men and a woman, passed into the Tiangong-1 ("Heavenly Palace") module a little under three hours after it docked with the Shenzhou-9 ("Divine Vessel") spacecraft.The Shenzhou-9 took off Saturday carrying the first Chinese woman to go into space, before undergoing the third automatic docking China has ever performed, and the first for a manned mission.